She leaned back wearily as if the conversation had exhausted her, while the peacock firescreen slipped from her hand and dropped on the white fur rug at her feet.

“If you’ll call Kesiah, Jonathan, I’ll go upstairs for a rest,” she said gently, yet with a veiled reproach.  “The journey tired me, but I forgot it in the pleasure of seeing you.”

All contrition at once, he hastily summoned Kesiah from the storeroom, and between them, with several solicitous maids in attendance, they carried the fragile little lady up to her chamber, where a fire of resinous pine was burning in the big colonial fireplace.

An hour afterwards, when Kesiah had seen her sister peacefully dozing, she went, for the first time since her return, into her own bedroom, and stood looking down on the hearth, where the servants had forgotten to light the sticks that were laid cross-wise on the andirons.  It was the habit of those about her to forget her existence, except when she was needed to render service, and after more than fifty years of such omissions, she had ceased, even in her thought, to pass judgment upon them.  In her youth she had rebelled fiercely—­rebelled against nature, against the universe, against the fundamental injustice that divided her sister’s lot from her own.  Generations existed only to win love or to bestow it.  Inheritance, training, temperament, all combined to develop the racial instinct within her, yet something stronger than these—­some external shaping of clay—­had unfitted her for the purpose for which she was designed.  And since, in the eyes of her generation, any self-expression from a woman, which was not associated with sex, was an affront to convention, that single gift of hers was doomed to wither away in the hot-house air that surrounded her.  A man would have struck for freedom, and have made a career for himself in the open world, but her nature was rooted deep in the rich and heavy soil from which she had tried to detach it.  Years after her first fight, on the day of her mother’s death, she had suffered a brief revival of youth; and then she had pulled in vain at the obstinate tendrils that held her to the spot in which she had grown.  She was no longer penniless, she was no longer needed, but she was crushed.  The power of revolt was the gift of youth.  Middle-age could put forth only a feeble and ineffectual resistance—­words without passion, acts without abandonment.  At times she still felt the old burning sense of injustice, the old resentment against life, but this passed quickly now, and she grew quiet as soon as her eyes fell on the flat, spare figure, a little bent in the chest, which her mirror revealed to her.  The period was full of woman’s advancement—­a peaceful revolution had triumphed around her—­yet she had taken no part in it, and the knowledge left her unmoved.  She had read countless novels that acclaimed hysterically the wrongs of her sex, but beneath the hysterics she had perceived the fact that